Hey! I take Kevin’s answer above as A New Hope ™.
I see this is on sale right now, is the consensus if I was to pick this up it would be good to do so by also purchasing all the accompanying DLC?
I liked the expansions for sure, especially since back then you didn’t get all the bug fixes and AI improvements without them.
That being said, I do have a hard time going back to Vicky after the later Paradox games. It’s great, but it sure is clunky in comparison!
I agree with Kevin on the clunkiness, but what is the price? If it’s reasonable, Vicky is the one game of Paradox’s that knows what it wants and what it is trying to do. Very clean, satisfying experience…
Thanks for the responses guys. I realize it might be a little clunky, but that might not matter because I’ve not played the games you’re comparing it to, haha. I only got pulled into the paradox world in the first place by the back door when they bought HBS which randomly resulted in me getting stellaris for free (not played yet) because I kickstarted battletech.
But to answer your question, 27 bucks is what’s showing on steam for the whole package include Vick 1 (which i doubt I’d play, but whatever). It’s just 5 bucks for base Vick 2. Hence my question about the DLC because a quick run through this thread indicates most thought adding the DLC was really a bit of a necessity so I wanted to check if that was still the consensus.
27 incl all DLC? Go for it.
Edit: just saw sale details , IMO its a good deal.
Thanks man, probably pull trigger and check it out this weekend. I’ll no doubt promptly get a bit lost and confused as to what’s going on, but that’s just par for the course so I’ll just let it roll over me and treat the first few games as learning experiences.
It’s a great game just be prepared for a learning curve and some struggles with the UI. Vicky 2 came after HOI3 which – while I really enjoyed it – was really the nadir in terms of overcomplication and broken mechanics. They pivoted after that but Vicky 2 was already in development at that point. It’s kind of the half-step towards the more polished experiences starting with Crusader Kings 2.
There is definitely a learning curve, but the key is going to be picking a good learner country that isn’t too big and lets you explore the different mechanics as you go. South America has always been a popular choice for one of those. You’ll be a civilized country that’s not too big and without a huge threat of invasion. Sweden also seems like a decent choice, but you run the risk of angering a big neighbor.
Thanks for the additional input Kevin and abrandt. I was thinking a good county to start with might be Brazil.
Brazil is a fantastic learn. Japan is good too, if you are familiar with Japanese history.
Another good option is Sweden. Start off highly literate, have path to Great Power status, and can become tech monsters. Are largely able to participate in Europe at your choice, or ignore as you will.
It’s a perfect learning spot.
I’ve always wondered why Sweden had such a good time in Vicky…hmmm…
My favorite challenging country? España.
I mean there definitely isn’t a running theme in every Paradox game where Sweden is always one of the strongest nations. Nope, definitely isn’t the case.
I really recommend starting with a great power in this game. You might get overwhelmed, but you lose a good chunk of the game mechanics playing as a minnow and might not enjoy the game quite as much as a result. Aside from game mechanics, there are way more unique flavor events for the powers, which is an area where the game shines. Frankly, I think starting with the United States is a good idea. It’s fairly isolated, so if you can win your war with Mexico (which is easy if you combine your troops immediately) and avoid antagonizing the UK early it should be relatively smooth sailing in a big sandbox (aside from the Civil War, which I can usually avoid and shouldn’t be too difficult to win in any event).
And yeah, Sweden almost always becomes ahistorically powerful in this game.
OK, I am going to crap all over this game, but I am actually hoping that someone can show me I am wrong, and that I am just missing things. (I do have an unerring ability to miss things.)
So… I tried to play the game years ago. It looked deep and interesting, and refreshingly focused on something other than wall-to-wall military map painting. But my computer made the game unplayable.
Now I pick it up years later, and I am really unhappy with what I am seeing. I have tried Russia and Brazil, and in each case the “proper” way to start is to set all your taxes at 100%. Tarrifs, too. Otherwise, you cannot balance the budget while supporting your military and education. And the outrageous thing is that this works. Your economy actually hums along, and after a while you can lower the sliders and still keep the budget balanced… So it is the contention of the game makers that a government, at least in the 1830s, could take ALL from the rich, the middle class, and the poor. And make imports of necessary items prohibitively expensive. And this would work just fine, prosperity would ensue? In my two countries, and in various Let’s Plays? Gimme a break here.
More likely, the top of these sliders does not represent 100% taxation. Rather, it must be that the top of the sliders represents an arbitrary limit the game is placing on your rate of taxation. But that is horrible, horrible game design, an indication that the game systems do not actually work. The slider is a visual indicator of choice, but in reality, it is a severe limiter of choice. And why?
Similarly, the military. As Brazil, I have a limit on my troops of 6. But I have other soldier pops, so this limit seems like a weird abitrary limit. And made much more weird when I look under movements and see that there are 64k reactionaries (23 possible brigades) ready to join in an uprising. So the nation has an arbitrary limit on troops (as do external opponents) but not internal opponents. Hmmm.
And those reactionary rebels. What are they rebelling over? The generic information in the mouseover indicates that such reactionaries are fighting against reforms, but I have not instituted a single reform.
By contrast, I see that I have a Suffrage Movement of 954 and a Voters Rights Movement of 122. So at least in those cases, I know what they want, and can choose to placate them or not. I also have the ability to spend suppression points to keep them down, albeit with negative consequences. But the reactionary rebels? With numbers potentially far greater than I am allowed to raise? No clarity. No method of mitigation. More like an RPG where the dragon is there because it is there, and because the creater of the game figured you needed a challenge to juice things up. (And as an aside, why am I not allowed to compare the size of the reform and reactionary movements? The Suffrage movement is 954 what? Thousands? Individuals? Pops?)
I read up on the reactionary rebels in the game, and I am told that I should not worry over-much, because they do not keep up technology-wise. Your weaponry and tactics will improve, while theirs will not, so they soon will become less of a threat. But again, this offends my sense of reality. Why are rebels stuck in 1836? I mean, reactionaries are people stuck in the past, but rarely does this extend to military development, and, in any case, why would they happen to be stuck in the year the game chooses as its start date?
I cannot help but think that this is a game that hides a lot of stupidity behind its depth and learning curve. If there are so many details and systems, so initially difficult to get a handle on, it must be really intelligent at its core. But I am feeling discouraged from going on with the game because it looks to me like, hiding behing all this complexity is a pile of idiocy.
But I hope someone can tell me why I am wrong, before I give up on this game.
No, that’s about it. That plus the market blackbox that you can’t meaningfully manipulate and hope it just works out alright.
But Victoria 3 will be awesome.
Essentially your desired tax rate and the effective tax rate of the state are two different things. The slider you set is your desired tax rate, however, in-game factors such as tax efficiency determines how effectively your bureaucracy can enforce\collect said taxes from the population. So your effective tax rate often differs from your stated taxation rate, you can easily see the difference between the two when you hover over the sliders and the tooltip pops up.
Been a while since I’ve played Victoria 2, so I can’t remember the exact mechanics off the top of my head, but there are methods to improve your tax efficiency which in turn reduces the gap between the taxation rate you set and what your government effectively collects. So having the slider be a representation of effective tax rate would require more player observation and micromanagement, since it would at the control of forces outside of solely the player’s own direct input.
Due to how poor effective taxation is in the beginning of the game for many nations due to factors such as tax efficiency the difference between the tax rate set by the player in the finances screen and a nation’s effective taxation rate is typically rather large for the likes of Russia. So setting the tax sliders to 100% is far from being an effective 100% tax on the lower, middle and upper classes. Additionally, how heavily you want to tax the upper class depends on the composition of your population.
Essentially, from a purely gameplay point of view ,the Aristocracy in Victoria II are not as useful as the Capitalists population type so exist mainly to be taxed as heavily as feasible. Depending on your economic strategy, Capitalists pops you often do not want to tax as heavily as they will invest in private projects such as industries and railroads, which typically often benefit your nation as the case was in my last USA playthrough.
The use of subsidies and tariffs is a whole topic on to itself, but for now I’ll just say that setting tariffs as high as they will go isn’t always a winning move and can be detrimental when applied in the wrong situations. The rest of the stuff mentioned I need to refresh my memory about before I can comment on the underlying gameplay mechanics at work. Though yes, for min-max purposes, it is best to try and maintain education funding at 100% all the time due to the benefits that increasing the literacy of your population has in the game when it comes to certain pop types, improving admin efficiency and other factors.
This is just me spitballing, but it could be that your two main issues with the game make sense when taken together. E.g. 1) you set an absurdly high tax rate/tariff rate, but don’t see the push-back you expect and 2) every single one of your citizens is rebelling. The problem might just be a missing tooltip, that expresses that citizens are unhappy over the taxes, which is pushing them to join rebellion movements. At a guess, your pops start out very conservative, so when pressed they start joining right-wing groups like the the Reactionary Rebels (RR).
if you lower your tax rate, does that reduce the number of RR over time?
Another thing, while 100% education is ideal, you might not be able to afford it. Russia is a basket case at the start of the game, and you probably can’t afford everything you need. From what I remember it’s a 100 year long effort to bring Russia to some semblance of rational and effective governance
Another thing to watch for is migrations over time. It’s possible to use the sliders/laws to make your country a terrible place to live, but over the decades you will see large amounts of your population emigrate to countries that aren’t so terrible. To quote the famous general: “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers”. Your country’s population will be steady or decline, while other countries will have sky rocketing growth.
Yes, that helps some. As long as you have low administration, 100% tax policy does not lead to 100% tax take. But this still strikes me as rather wacky on two levels. First that you can very effectively get around woeful tax collection ability by aiming to take everything. And second, that an effort to take everything does not lead to extreme reaction, and not just from those opposed to liberal reforms. (In modern times, tax collection is often tied to funding of liberal reform, but no such thing is going on here.)
I definitely understand that setting tariffs extremely high should not automatically be a winning move – that is part of my point. It actually works extremely well to jack up tariffs and intended tax collection – the economy is soon humming, and thus you no longer need to those settings so high.